Herb Garden Design

Brush past a rosemary bush and the air changes. Pinch a leaf of lemon balm and your fingers smell faintly of sherbet for the rest of the afternoon. Herbs are plants you use, and a herb garden has to earn its keep: close enough to the kitchen that you’ll go out in the rain for a handful of parsley, and generous enough that a summer’s picking doesn’t leave it looking moth-eaten. This book shows you how to plan and build a herb garden that is both productive and a pleasure to look at. It starts from a simple idea. Herbs fall into two camps: the sun-loving Mediterranean herbs, such as thyme, sage and lavender, which want lean, sharply drained soil, and the soft, leafy herbs, such as parsley, chives and mint, which want something richer and damper. Much of the design work comes back to giving each camp what it wants while keeping the whole thing looking like one intended place. From there it moves from siting and soil, through design principles and the old monastic, physic and knot gardens, to step-by-step construction, themed gardens, ten planting plans and profiles of more than fifty herbs. What you’ll find inside • Siting for sun and shelter, a simple sun survey, and why the kitchen door matters • Reading your soil, testing drainage, and preparing beds for both lean-soil and rich-soil herbs • Design principles applied to herbs: structure, repetition, height, colour, texture and scent • Lessons from real gardens, including the Plan of St Gall, Chelsea Physic Garden, Sissinghurst and Beth Chatto’s Gravel Garden • Designing, laying out and clipping a home knot garden, with herbs as edging in place of box • Building a herb spiral, raised beds, a herb wheel, a chequerboard and a gravel bed, step by step • Herb borders, potagers, and thyme and chamomile lawns, paths and seats •…